The End of An Era… The Erasure of the Unions by Gerald Grant
Today in my home state of Michigan, they passed a bill known as Right to Work. What right to work allows is people to not have to join unions if they work in an environment that is unionized. If you’re a new hire – you get to enjoy all the perks of what the union got for those employees, but you don’t have to pay a dime in dues for the continual representation of said union. Once you tell someone that they don’t have to pay for a service and still will get its perks, people neglect to pay for the service – I mean, who wouldn’t want something for free. But it doesn’t stop there…once you strip the need for payment of these services, it’s only a matter of time before the union representing you will no longer be able to afford to represent you, essentially killing off the union. Once the union has been killed off, the contract negotiated can be thrown out, and all the gains enjoyed by the representation are surely removed, in that firm’s attempt to become more
profitable. To the outside looking in, you wouldn’t see a problem with this… if a company can make more money, then they’d have more to give their employees, then they’d give better and cheaper benefits to the employee and other perks because they’ve made more money, right? Sadly, the past few years have taught us that this isn’t the case. Most US fortune 500 firms have earned their best profit margins over the entirety of their existence within the last few years. Constantly you see on TV how the stock market has grown by leaps and bounds; CEO and senior staff getting multitude of bonuses into obscene millions of dollars. But, the average employee fearfully comes into work daily, sometimes extremely ill and tired, out of fear of losing their job. Many workers haven’t seen a raise in pay in over 5 years – or received miniscule increases that can’t keep up with the steadily increasing